Experiencing Multiplicity: food and identity

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Experiencing Multiplicity food and identity

• Minjoo Oh

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• Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you
  are.
• Can you tell who I am if I tell you what I eat?

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• Body
• Home
• Community
• City
• Region
• National
• Global

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• French wine and Turkish coffee houses represent
  suitable cultural metaphors for learning how to
  do business with those countries.
• Drinking Guinness is a strong connotation of
  Irishness.

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• Rice as the staple of Japanese diet has a special
  centrality in national identity formation Rice
  as Self (1993) by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

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• What items constitute the Japanese diet?

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• What is archetypal American food?

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• American
• homogeneous, processed, mass-produced food
• The multi-ethnic mixtures of particular regions

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Jennifer Lee hunts for General Tao

• http//www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jennifer_8_lee_l
  ooks_for_general_tso.html

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• The longer we ponder questions like these, the
  more difficult they become to answer.
• National cuisines are in a process of constant
  reinvention, absorbing new influences and letting
  some traditions die out.

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• Nevertheless, a nations diet can have a key role
  to play in nationalistic sentiments, with
  threatened invasions of filthy foreign food
  being seen as dangerous to the whole fabric of
  national identity.

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• At the same time, national cuisines are often
  celebrated for their exotic difference.
• Sometimes a nations identity is captured by a
  single food item.
• For instance, curry is synonymous with India. In
  other cases, it is the manner of cooking as much
  as the ingredients and final dishes with define a
  national cuisine.

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• Food and the nation are so commingled in popular
  discourses that it is often difficult not to
  think one through the other.

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• To imagine a Japan without ramen almost borders
  on heresy.
• Ramen is so Japanese.
• from Barak Kushners interview

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How to eat ramen

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v6WrkdTrrwew

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• Like a language, food articulates notion of
  inclusion and exclusion, of national pride and
  xenophobia, on our tables and in our lunchboxes.
• The history of any nations diet is the history
  of the nation itself, with food fashions, fads
  and fancies mapping episodes of colonialism and
  migration, trade and exploration, cultural
  exchange and boundary-making.

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• And yet here begins one of the fundamental
  contradictions of the food-nationalism equation
  there is no essential national food.
• The food which we think of as characterizing a
  particular place always tells stories of movement
  and mixing.

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• What appear to be indigenous foodways may
  actually be cultural imports, like the café,
  whose French cultural identity is relatively
  recent, having been imported in the seventeenth
  century.

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Ramen

• Ramen entered the Japanese market as an
  inexpensive, accessible, low-class food for
  itinerant peddlers and poor students in the early
  twentieth century.

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• The number of chinese students living in Japan
  was significant, one of the largest foreign
  groups by far.
• From 1896 to just before 1938, approximately
  fifty thousand Chinese students in some form or
  other studied in Japan, greatly influencing lower
  and middle class restaurant offerings in most
  urban areas.

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• Chinese emigrated to Japan to work. However,
  after losing to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War in
  1895, they came in increasing numbers to study
  how Japan modernized so quickly and surpassed
  China.
• Students as well as laborers flocked to the new
  communities in Yokohama, parts of Tokyo, Kyushu,
  Kobe, and Sapporo in the north.

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• Ramen tells an historical story different from
  our stereotyped assumptions of Japanese cuisine
  and its interaction with foreign communities.

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• The Japanese of the early Taisho era (1912-26)
  considered Chinese cuisine backward. Not until
  after World War Two did Chinese cuisine gain
  recognition as something worthy.

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Instant ramen

• Instant ramen were created in 1958 by Japans
  Nissin Foods.

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• Momofuki Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka at
  96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the
  working class when he invented ramen noodles in
  1958. His product fried, dried and sold in
  little plastic wrapped bricks or foam cups
  turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into
  a global giant.

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• Ironically, Japans food industry initially
  rejected the product as a novelty with no future.
• Instant ramen representing Made in Japan, are
  now not only a national food but a global food.

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• Now sells more than 65 billion bowls every year
  (as of 2008)
• more people around the world eat ramen in some
  form on a daily basis than any other foodstuff.

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• In 2000, the Fuji Research Institute had survey
  of what the Japanese see as their best exports
  and their best invention of the 20th century.
• Instant ramen
• Karaoke
• Walkman
• Nintendo
• Compact discs
• Compact cameras
• Akira Kurosawa
• Pokemon

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• Okuyama Tadamasa claims that the proliferation of
  ramen franchises in Japan and its spread from the
  Far East into the rest of the world demonstrate
  the end of western dominance over national
  cuisines.

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• Taiwan, according to statistics from the
  International Ramen Manufacturers Association, is
  the worlds 12th largest instant noodle market,
  worth an annual US300 million. This translates
  into an annual total of 900 million packs, or 40
  per person. (2007)

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• South Koreans consume the greatest amount of
  instant noodles, 69 per capita per year.

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Economic indicator

• In Thailand, the dominant Mama noodles brad has
  spawned the Mama Noodles index, which
  accurately forecast a weakening of the economy in
  2005.

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• The 2 million inmates in U.S. prisons would be
  responsible for about 10 of the nations 4.2
  billion instant-noodles sales (November 4th 2008,
  MSN)
• What inmates once priced in cigarettes they now
  trade for noodles.

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• College students

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Popularity of ramen

• The end of Western dominance?
• Clash of civilization ?
• or, constant symbiotic synthesis?

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• Okuyamas thesis posits a happy and peaceful
  co-existence of cultures leading to tasty treats
  in the next century in contrast to the more
  pessimistic view of Huntington.

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Claude Levi-Strauss

• Food is not only good to eat, but also good to
  think with.

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Mary Douglas

• If food is treated as a code, the messages it
  encodes will be found in the pattern of social
  relations being expressed. The message is about
  different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and
  exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the
  boundaries.

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Metamorphoses of ramen

1. Immigrant food
2. Urban laborer
3. An antidote for postwar starvation
4. New taste of convenience and speed
5. Elite dish (not-instant, traditional kind has
   become hip)

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Glocalization

• A term that was invented in order to emphasize
  that the globalization of a product is more
  likely to succeed when the product or service is
  adapted specifically to each locality or culture
  it is marketed in. The term combines the word
  globalization with localization.

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Fast Food

• McDonald
• Ekiban
• Yumcha
• Thai street food

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Fast Food Nation The Dark Side of the
All-American Meal

• Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool
  air, walk in, get on line, study the backlit
  color photographs above the counter, place your
  order, hand over a few dollars, watch teenagers
  in uniforms pushing various buttons, and moments
  later take hold of a plastic tray full of food
  wrapped in colored paper and cardboard. The whole
  experience of buying fast food has become so
  routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane,
  that it is now taken for granted, like brushing
  your teeth or stopping for a red light. It has
  become a social custom as American as a small,
  rectangular, hand-held, frozen, and reheated
  apple pie. (Eric Schlosser, 2001 4)

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Savor Slowly Ekiben The Fast Food of High
Speed Japan

• Ekiben railroad station box-lunches
• These lunches consists of small boxes containing
  a variety of food items, all part of traditional
  Japanese cuisine, sold in railroad stations and
  trains all over the country.

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Yumcha

• Yumcha as a form of food consumption can best be
  understood in contrast to a meal. A meal is
  considered to be proper, official, elaborate it
  involves a fixed schedule with dishes served
  according to an established program, and it
  always includes a staple such as rice.

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• Yumcha is considered to be casual and unofficial,
  and staples are not necessarily involved. Whereas
  meals are served by someone such as a waiter,
  yumcha involves more self-help behavior.

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Not From Scratch Thai Food Systems and Public
Eating

• Women can be seen stopping at a food shop in the
  evenings on their way home from work to pick up
  dinner for the family, main courses are placed in
  small plastic bags with rice being prepared
  easily at home in a rice cooker... For typically
  middle-class Bangkokians particularly women who
  tend to be impeccably dressed frequently cool,
  comfortable establishments is the most desirable
  option. The urban masses are, for the most part,
  of humble economic means and purchase food on the
  streets and from vendors both mobile and
  stationary, and small food-shops specializing in
  noodles, curried dishes or other fare.

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• If our identities became homeless, exile,
  migrant, nomadic, displaced, and permanent
  stranger-like, how can we talk about the
  connection between what we eat and who we are?

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• We conceive of our age as existing beyond the
  normal frames of time and space. Time flies, and
  yet each instant is crammed with things to do.
  Time-saving devices create more time but also
  require us to save more of it. Vast distances
  are crossed in no time at all, and yet we seem to
  spend all of our time either going from place to
  place or watching the world go by. There is no
  time to do nothing and no place to do it because
  doing nothing seems too much like doing something
  else. (Siebers, 1994 1)